PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

The secret temple stands in the heart of the war zone.

Few people even know that it is there.

Through the chaos, the mayhem, the uncertainty, the liturgies continue.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

Twice daily, the priest makes the offering and prays on the people's behalf.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

In all times, year in, year out, the liturgies continue.

May the people have life. May the people have food. May the people have beauty.

Now, in time of conflict, to the three traditional prayers, the priest adds a fourth:

As the Block Watch meeting is breaking up, one woman asks: Does anyone on this block actually own a gun?

We all stand around like a bunch of shamefaced kids caught with our hands in the cookie jar. Just as I thought: we're all a bunch of pansy-ass South Minneapolis liberal wussies.

No wonder this is such a good place to live.

We talk available weapons. The folks with kids have baseball bats, and a couple of beanbag guns. Me, I've got a sword and a spear, neither of which I've ever used in anything but ritual contexts.

We laugh and head home to supper. Curfew doesn't start for a couple of hours yet. Deescalation is mostly the way we do things around here. Real violence is for cowards.

Still, you know what they say: the most powerful weapon of all is intimidation.

Ye gods.

Nazi infiltrators, anarchy in the streets, a city on fire.

And I'm going out to mow the lawn.

Absurd, or profound? Wisdom, or folly?

Oh well. My city is on fire. The head of state is a blustering incompetent. My country is tearing out its own heart. Right now, those are things that I can't do anything about.

But at least the yard will look good.

The stories going round here at Riot Central would have it that the worst of the mayhem that has dogged the heels of justified protests like a fell shadow—the arson, in particular—is the orchestrated work of out-of-town...well, I'm just going to say Nazis.

(You can go all polysyllabic here if you want to. For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to call a Nazi a Nazi.)

There would seem to be a certain amount of evidence to back up such stories. I've seen the trucks with the gun racks and the out-of-state license plates—or no license plates at all (talk about cowardly)—in my own neighborhood.

Since the police didn't have to waste their time and energy on protesters Saturday night (take heed, O ye self-righteous), they actually managed to nab a lot of these f*ckers by closing the freeways and, in particular, barricading the main drags.

This latter move is very clever. Locals who needed to, could still get around because we know the back ways, but the out-of-towners were stuck like roaches in a roach motel. A lot of those trucks, I hear, had lots and lots of weapons in them.

The one thing that I never expected to become was a war correspondent.

During the last five days, I've watched the neighborhood that I've worked to help build for the past 35 years be systematically destroyed around me. In some places, the fires are still burning.

But let me tell you what I'll remember most about these days following the murder of George Floyd—let us speak and remember his name—and their fiery aftermath.

People with brooms and shovels on their shoulders.

They began appearing on the morning after the first looting and burning.

(A curse on the burners, but not of us. May the work of their hands, and hearts, come back on their own heads a hundred-fold, and let us all say: So mote it be.)

By yesterday, four days into the crisis, I'd seen hundreds of them.

Hundreds of people, all colors, all ages, wondering the streets with brooms and snow shovels—everyone in Minnesota has a snow shovel—slung over their shoulders, looking for someone, anyone, who needed help with clean-up. When they found them, they'd help until they'd done what they could. Then they'd head off again, looking for another stranger to help.

It's been, thank Goddess, a quiet night in Minneapolis.

(Those too froward to go home and stay there after repeated warnings, get no pity from me. When you insist on poking your finger into someone's eye, you don't get to complain when he clobbers you with a board.)

Let us make no mistake: this is not the end.

When we moved into this neighborhood some 35 years ago, it was dying. The storefronts on Lake Street were mostly boarded up.

Call it the American miracle. Immigration from Mexico, Central and South America, and Somalia turned this neighborhood around. Little ethnic mom-pop shops resurrected Lake Street.

Now every single one of those businesses is gone. Over the course of the past four nights, I have watched my neighborhood be systematically dismantled around me.

Last night it was the white kids' turn.

Hundreds of angry white kids—let me be nasty and say trust-fund anarchists from the suburbs—defied the governor's curfew orders and marched through a largely ethnic and immigrant neighborhood already traumatized by three nights of fires and looting.

I live just a few hundred feet from the epicenter of last night's destruction. More buildings and businesses—virtually all of them Latino-owned—were pillaged and torched. Four of them are still burning as I write this.

Truly, a mob is an organism with many legs and no brain.

“Why don't these kids all go back to the suburbs and leave us alone?” my next-door neighbor said to me as we stood on the sidewalk and watched the noisy march. Penny, who's African-American, is the block matriarch; she's lived here longer than anyone else.

If it weren't for the violence that accompanied it, it all would have been kind of funny. The whole thing had a defiance-for-the-sake-of-defiance “I'm not going to bed and Mommy/Daddy can't make me” feel to it.

Eventually, of course, the trust-fund anarchists went back to their apartments in other (quiet) neighborhoods, leaving behind them more burning buildings and more mayhem in a neighborhood already traumatized by its own destruction.

I have not the slightest doubt that the vast majority of those folks last night honestly want justice for George Floyd (1974-2002), an African-American man brutally murdered on Memorial Day by a white policeman only blocks from here. Believe me, so does everybody in this neighborhood.

Paganistan is burning.

I wake at 3:30. As is my wont, I make my rounds through the dark house.

From the back, I can see the smoke, livid red. Opening the door, I smell the smell of things not meant to burn, hear the unmistakable sound of a large fire.

I pull on clothes and go out. Two men, drunk, are sitting on the sidewalk across the street. One of them calls out to me, incoherently. I turn the corner onto Lake Street, artery of fire through the heart of the pagan neighborhood.

I walk toward the fire. Two blocks away, the auto parts store is burning.

Suddenly I'm filled with a bright red fury at all the breakers of the world. It takes months to carve a beautiful statue, only a few seconds to smash it.

I turn back towards home. Looters are coming out of the Somali adult day care center across Lake Street.

Back in the house, I dial 911.

 “I was not the High King, that my doing should bring evil on the land.”

(Artos the Bear, in Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset)

Pagan leadership is sacrificial leadership, and I'm not just talking about the kind of petty sniping and backbiting that dogs pretty much anyone with the audacity to step into a position of leadership in pretty much any pagan community.

All those stories about the King Must Die aren't really talking about cutting out hearts on altars; not literally, anyway. What they're really talking about is the price of leadership.

If you're not willing to lay yourself down on the altar, you have no right to lead.

Only those willing to sacrifice themselves are worthy.

That's why—rightly or wrongly—the Old Ways saw a direct connection between the actions of the leader and the well-being of the land and the people.

So look at the current situation in America.